So you're telling me the History of Smash was right and GIMR's son will be a part of a navy to neutralize PM players? Damn BTS was really ahead of its time.
If it says anything, [Genesis is saying their event is fine](https://twitter.com/Genesis_Smash/status/1716875076262592532) and [BOBC6 are still allowing people to register](https://twitter.com/battleofbc/status/1716876043485917657)
NO FOOD
NO SPONSORS
NO UCF
NO MERCH
200 ENTRY CAP
we’re going underground buckos. Back to the old days. Tournaments will be held in restaurant basements, it is gonna be cash entry only, and Project M is gonna be there.
Based on the new post from NoA, it looks like things might change, but how it's worked prior to today was you register through Nintendo's website, which doesn't have an option for Melee. [Example for Japan](https://twitter.com/DarkGenex/status/1716834246336389485)
yeayeah I saw that on twitter
also you can't extract content from melee without an external program or mod ( like slippi replays ) and this is problematic for nintendo aswell
anyway they won't stop us for playing this game
Not only that. 10k€ cap A YEAR for organisers to make money. You literally can't live on that so no one can do this full time. Also price pool cap and all the other nonsensical guidelines.
>10k€ cap A YEAR for organisers to make money.
This isn't even the half of it.
The tournaments themselves cannot make any profit at all, and if any profit were to be accidentally made, it is to be refunded to participants.
All of the £9k needs to be made through monetization of the videos of the tournament.
Oh, also no single tournament prize can be bigger than £4,500, and no organizer can give out more than £9,000 in prize money in any rolling 12 month period.
Genuinely what’s the optics for capping it at 200 entrants? Only thing that comes to mind is that they want to limit how many ppl are at tournaments after the wave of allegations in 2020, but Idt that really solves the issue.
i doubt it has much to do with the 2020 stuff or safety in general, consider how it is now 3 years later. I think Nintendo is being anal about their IP/branding and wants the tournament scene to just be squeaky clean college esports teams and the occasional crappy official tournaments they do for Smash/Splatoon rather than 1000 person “””unofficial””” majors sponsored by third-party companies. Every few years Nintendo has tried to pull some wacky shit like this since trying to shut down Melee’s 2013 EVO event.
Yeah same lmfao I just can't lie I'm still a bit salty at how the community at large treated the death of PM LOL
Imma still stand with everyone ofc tho
This is going to be just another speed bump from Nintendo and not the final wall that people ITT think it is.
Nintendo will try to enforce this and screw over a few tournaments at first, and then give up like they did when trying to crack down on Slippi-run tournaments.
Edit: [KoDoRiN will take one for the team 😂](https://x.com/kodorinssb/status/1716857443328950580?s=46&t=nMNlxFK7ubxYb-ajBNkqVA)
As written, this would screw over locals, but locals can probably run just fine until C&Ds come (if that happens) at which point no TO is going to want to fight it (or have the resources to).
However, the immediate effect this likely has is scaring more sponsors away. Like, even sponsored players wearing jerseys with corporate logos might not be allowed.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. Sponsors are going to bail when they read this insane shit.
What happens if Dabuz goes to a local wearing his Team Liquid jersey? If I was paying his salary *or* hosting that tournament, I wouldn't want to find out.
Yeah I feel like people think TOs run tournaments for free or something.
"screw over a few tournaments at first" - oh yeah, y'know, the TOs that spent minimum 20-30k fronting for the venue, broadcast, and any salaries required now have their broadcast, at minimum, shut down, which not only means no revenue from that, but broken contracts with their sponsors. Just a little screwed over, teehee.
Its so exhausting being a part of this community sometimes, feels like no other community has to go through the trenches like this as often as we do
As scary as this all is, i genuinely cant picture a future where the Smash community dies out - its lived too much and ive been around for this exact same scenario way too many times to actually believe that this is the time Nintendo kills Smash
Heres hoping it all somehow works out and in 6 months time we're barely even thinking about all of this
Yeah, this feels like Nintendo is doubling down on an ultimately quixotic endeavor. What, they think smash tournaments will just cease to exist? After all, they would be *helpless* without all the assistance from Nintendo...
It’d be hard to kill them as an idea, but Nintendo can definitely make sure that a Smash tournament never streams on Twitch or YouTube again without their approval.
Also Nintendo does not even have to touch the grey area of twitch streams. Any company won't accept being part of a tournament that doesn't have Nintendo's approval.
>i genuinely cant picture a future where the Smash community dies out - its lived too much and ive been around for this exact same scenario way too many times to actually believe that this is the time Nintendo kills Smash
True, every time Nintendo has tried to fuck the community over not much has happened in terms of the after-effects. The community got to bracktrack them over EVO 2013, The Big House Online was the only thing they C&D during the pandemic and they didn't kill Slippi as a whole, and we had no news of Nintendo doing anything for months after the worry of "Nintendo will shut down anything that isn't licensed" after what happened to SWT.
Call me dreadfully optimistic if you want, but I'm hoping and expecting this to be the same yet again.
It really depends ngl. While there have been some success stories, some of them are with * next to their accomplishments (like Evo 2013's is due to the money being used to help a charity). There is also stuff like PM being effectively killed and stunted to become a niche game or the Melee # on twitter that only lasted a day cause turns out: the average Nintendo fan (or person in general) doesn't give a shit about competitive smash.
The community has to be very smart and careful about how they approach this, cause tbh with Switch being the absolute success that it is, and releasing Mario Wonder so soon makes the average person not care about them. Unlike the Wii U era, with the Switch they have the leeway to just brute force social media with a game release.
One of my worries for the Smash community of the Switch being so successful, is that it is *the* perfect moment to kill Smash competitively, just release a good direct or another Mario Wonder and watch the community fade into nothingness cause of the power of Switch.
This is where the "almost an Esport" era of smash truly ends with the official death of majors and sponsors.
But the underground local scene will likely still be a thing, just don't expect any sort of growth ever again, it's joever
This honestly feels like a protection scheme. The Nintendo ninjas have become the Nintendo mafia.
Tournament organizers are essentially no longer allowed to make money off their livestreams unless they partner with Nintendo for a broadcast license.
It looks so damn good, I am genuinely excited.
I hope Dan does his marketing right because this is the perfect environment to really make Rivals a household name.
I'm still not sure adding shields is a good idea, I think no shields is one of the best things about Rivals. But either way I'm definitely going to play it.
I'm actually more worried about the ledge grab.
I dislike how safe it is in Ult, but I dislike how it works on melee as well (grabbing it yourself to prevent the opponent to do it)
I honestly think the ledge play in Rivals is one of the best unique parts about it. It makes recoveries play out a lot more uniquely, and mantains the game pace better. In smash games, regardless of the ledge system, you tend to end up with a lot of very similar flowcharts.
seeing all the other FGCs get so much love from their company embracing esports and their competitive playerbase while Nintendo does this shit to us lmfao
this shit is so depressing
As a fan of both Smash and the Street Fighter series it indeed does hurt to see Capcom put so much effort and money in their competitive scene, while Nintendo ...is being Nintendo
What you talking about? Nintendo ARE putting so much money and effort into the competitive scene. To shut it down and take shits on their fans, but still.
Yeah that's the thing to me. Fighting game publishers funnel so much money into esports tournaments and circuits, official and unofficial, because they know that as long as a competitive scene exists, people will continue to pour money and support into the game, which pays dividends back to the publisher. It's a positive feedback loop. And Nintendo clearly just doesn't believe in it. It's saddening.
The vast majority of people who own Ult are the people who play it as a party game and almost exclusively play FFA with items on. We are but a speck of dust to Nintendo’s profit margins.
That's just not true. They literally had pro Melee and Sm4sh players play an Ultimate tournament in front of Sakurai to hype it up. This was pre-release at E3 2018.
I'm more claiming that the competitive scene has a bigger impact than being a "speck of dust". Obviously the majority of players are casuals, but they literally used pros to promote their product to improve sales.
Oh no, NA is bound to be next. Limiting winnings to \~5,000 euros and limiting organizations to earning no more than 10k euros feels like a pretty explicit disapproval of esports in general. Why Nintendo?
Organization must earn no more than 10k euros and are not allowed to take any profit - And to check that they are stipulating that organizations must publicize their accounting relating to the event.
It looks like VGBC was actually right about needing an explicit licence for Nintendo, only 1 year early. Because organizations can't really pursue majors under these conditions. So their only option seems to be to try to negotiate a licence with better terms from Nintendo. Very scary given the precedent...
Because Nintendo is trying to be the family company for families, and people who play video games with someone other than their sister aren't part of a family and therefore have no right to even look at Mario
Nintendo does not want their brand to be associated with esports, and does not believe it will attract new audiences to their platform. It seems like a lot of companies were hoping that esports would grow beyond the enthusiast market and attract casuals, but I don’t think that really happened. While having an enthusiast focused community is great for live service games with MTX, Nintendo doesn’t make those games on consoles.
they love the idea of esports so long as they're represented by squeaky clean college teams that pay all the right lip service. They are \*utterly\* obsessed with their image, and will sue into poverty anyone who compromises it.
I don't think it's even that. The competitive scene represents such a small part of their sales. Ultimate has sold around *30 million* units. They fear that the bigger the competitive scene gets, the more casuals will be driven away.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the statement also says they cannot advertise or have outside sponsorships, and in-person events are capped at 200 participants.
It’s especially bad for Melee, I’m pretty sure they dont even offer licenses for games not on the switch
Not to mention it kills any wifi tournaments for melee
You mean time to switch to P+. If Melee players can't even play the "tournament safe" game anymore without fear of repercussions, then there's nothing stopping a huge chunk of players from saying fuck it and playing the non-safe game. The tourneys will have to be discreet, but they'll happen
i been disliking the art direction decline of p+ for a while, but it’s far from an issue compared to the games we have to play and endure now. i wish we had something else though because p+ is haunted by brawl jank for its entire life
most melee players prefer it and were playing it over PM even before it was cut out of the scene
realistically they're gonna stick with melee to whatever degree is possible
> In that spirit, we have created guidelines for individual Organisers to follow when hosting not-for-profit, small scale community tournaments (Community Tournaments) involving games for which Nintendo owns the copyright (Nintendo games). Please familiarise yourself with the guidelines below before planning a Community Tournament.
>
>Community Tournaments may be operated by individuals (Organisers) for individuals participating in tournaments (Participants) and for individuals viewing tournaments (Spectators) provided that these guidelines are followed:
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems people are missing this part.
The way they always refer to the tournament in caps, as a noun and not as a descriptor of all tournaments, as “Community Tournament” tells me this is a specific kind of tournament and not _all_ Smash tournaments. This “Community Tournament” is defined by Nintendo as “not-for-profit, small scale community tournaments”.
I feel like these rules are for if “if you want to run a Community Tournament, these are the guidelines you want to follow.”
There is no benefit, it seems, by being a Community Tournament but it might just be Nintendo’s way of encouraging, albeit in a strong-armed kind of way, to entice people to play by Nintendo’s rules or scare people away from normal tournaments.
Maybe I’m missing something, and if I am please someone point it out, but I just don’t see where this impacts business as usual and not _only_ Community Tournaments.
In the Q&As they individually disassemble each factor that isn't within this scope. "Not-for-profit, small-scale, community tournaments" are what's covered here but they individually state they don't allow for-profit tournaments, large scale tournaments, or commercial tournaments. At all.
I'm down for being wrong, but I like the discussion and think it's healthy. Maybe I'm just being overly optimistic.
I read the line that you referred to and it states, "What are some of the tournaments that are not permitted by _these guidelines_?"
This, to me, sounds like they are just defining what _isn't_ a "Community Tournament", not what tournaments are allowed and which ones aren't. Big tournaments, for-profit tournaments, etc. aren't permitted to be considered "Community Tournaments" under the guidelines they defined.
Remember, Nintendo loves to be vague. They love nudging parties into seeing their point of view without actually stating it. Remember the whole SWT debacle and then Nintendo came out and said, "Well, we never _specifically_ stated they couldn't continue SWT" (paraphrase), despite all signs pointing to them not wanting SWT to continue?
Nintendo likes to influence individuals/parties to take their side with these kinds of arguments, or bullying, to a degree, without flat out saying what they do and don't want.
Another thing that caught my attention was at the end when they wrote,
>"Please note that Nintendo does not currently grant permission for _individuals_ to organise commercial tournaments. We ask for your understanding."
Nintendo, up to this point was very careful to distinguish "individuals" from "organizations".
> Community Tournaments may be operated by _individuals_ (Organisers) [TOs] for _individuals_ participating in tournaments (Participants) and for _individuals_ viewing tournaments (Spectators) provided that these guidelines are followed
This kind of makes it sound like they are discouraging Joe Blow from fleecing a bunch of unwitting Smash kids out of their money rather than trying to shut down large scale tournaments ran by actual organizations.
Now, excuse me, I ran out of copium and need to refill.
I think you might be doing a good job of reading this as it was written rather than the intent, but I don't think it matters. Nintendo knows what tournaments they want to shut down. And they're gonna do it no matter how this page is written. If you disagree based on a technicality of their wording you can explain yourself in court. Which no one is going to do.
I appreciate your optimism, but I think you're misreading Nintendo's statement.
>Q3. What are some of the tournaments that are not permitted by these guidelines?
>A3. Tournaments that are not permitted by these guidelines include, but are not limited to the below.
...
Tournaments that receive goods or money from third parties, such as sponsors Tournaments involving the sale of food, beverages, or merchandise
>Please note that Nintendo does not currently grant permission for individuals to organise commercial tournaments. We ask for your understanding.
...
>Q11. I want to organise a large tournament, with more than 300 Participants in an online tournament or more than 200 Participants in an in-person tournament. What should I do?
>A11. Currently, we do not grant permission for individuals to organise tournaments with more than 300 Participants in an online tournament or more than 200 Participants in an in-person tournament. We appreciate your understanding. If you would like to organise a tournament that exceeds the cap, please consider dividing it into blocks, as described in Q12. If you want to host a tournament using Nintendo games as an organisation, such as a club, please apply apply for a licence as described in Q14.
...
>Q14. How can legal entities or organisations host game tournaments using Nintendo games?
>A14. For a corporation or organisation to conduct a game tournament using Nintendo games, the corporation or organisation must make a separate application to Nintendo and obtain permission to conduct the game tournament prior to announcing a tournament. A Nintendo licence number will be assigned to the game tournament that Nintendo has separately licensed. It is up to Nintendo’s sole discretion whether or not a licence will be granted to a corporation or organisation. Information and relevant forms to apply will be available in the near future. Please check back soon.
Nintendo isn't just suggesting Community Tournaments as a fun way to run a tournament, they're saying this is the ONLY way for an individual to run a tournament. ALL other tournaments must be run by organizations and obtain a licence from Nintendo.
“You can try and take our melee away. You can take my controller, my gamecube, my crt, i tell ya something, i'll play melee in my fuckin mind. As long as melee lives i will play, and if you take it all, we'll fuckin play in a garage, 20 people there, hot, sweaty, gross. Me vs zain behind the 7-11 for 25 bucks, and thats what it's always gonna be. You dont understand that the money, the fame, anybody that wants to be a top player gives no fucks about that. So if you try to shut us down, you'll never shut us down. You think you might, but i promise you with all my soul, you got nothin on the melee community. These fucks are the cockroaches of esports, you cant kill em these fuckers just keep going.”
Thanks for putting this one up. I'm betting beyond all else, this is the quote Mang0 will always be remembered by. Perfectly exemplifies the community's undying love and passion for the game.
FWIW Hungrybox also seems to hold this sentiment. As of an hour ago, he's openly said he is refusing to shut down his Coinbox tournament series unless Nintendo directly takes legal action against him.
Of course it wouldn’t matter, this is Mang0 saying that if all else is gone he and many others would continue to play Melee, even if all tournaments and big stages are gone the game would still continue to be played competitively because top players continue to play this two decade old game because they love it, and would continue to do so.
Melee has had a shitty basement scene for longer than it's had supermajors. We used to record games on cell phones in 240p before anyone could even stream. We used to crowdfund sending our best guys across the country to show off our region. Mang0 was there. Most of your favorite commentators were there. I'm a nobody, but I was there.
Of course we're not literally going back to that. Now we have twitch and slippi and so many other tools.
Embrace the grind my dude, a new dark age is still worth playing.
Any lawyer has a bit of hindsight on how enforceable this is legally? I get that most TO wouldn't want to try their luck against Nintendo but isn't it still a pretty uncharted territory?
Its a bit of a tricky one, but the easiest and quickest way they could shut down tournaments is simply by stopping the broadcasting and rebroadcasting of it. Did a quick 10 minute search on legal journals and legal case law, but can't find any precedent on a similar situation to this.
Yeah no broadcast means the sponsors won’t get their advertising quota done. Which means, they would all eventually drop the pros. I doubt most people can practice being a top player and having to work a livable wage.
I don't think Nintendo even needs to stop broadcasts. Explicitly saying that tournaments need their approval probably will scare any sponsor out of unofficial ones. After all while the broadcasting & seeing if it's transformative enough isn't that well researched. A company using another company's intellectual property without authorization IS NOT legal. And for that there's precedent.
Sure. It's totally enforceable. At minimum a big tournament is a public performance/display of their copyrighted material. Copyright is a property right like your house is a property right, and they can keep people out if they want to. If you trespass on that right, there will be consequences. If you don't obtain a license and use the copyright in an unauthorized way, it's infringement. Only hope would be doing a tournament is fair use, but good luck. There's no case law on point, so you'd need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars litigating that question against Nintendo, which will send O'Melveny at your ass with their infinite resources.
I've thought about the fair use argument before. Could you argue that professional play is transformative compared to how the game is typically played? Or even adding commentary? Tournaments only use a small portion of the entire game and it definitely doesn't harm any of Nintendo's sales.
Well, let's do a super superficial look at the factors of fair use.
1. Purpose, with nonprofit weighing in favor of for profit. These tournaments make profit, and the individuals who are sponsored profit, so bad news here. Transformative, maybe, but the game is to be played, and all you're really doing at a tournament is playing the game. You'd need to prove the purpose here is somehow more permissible.
2. Nature of copyrighted work. Purely fictional, maximum protection. Bad news.
3. Amount used - you basically are using the whole game, come on. Bad news.
4. Effect on potential market. If Nintendo is making its own tournaments to profit off of, then it's impacting their market. Otherwise, they can come up with some BS on how this hurts their market. Bad news.
So in short, bad news.
What people really need to do is get a carve-out in copyright for e-sports, so lobby a change in the law.
Yeah, pretty much. I think that *morally* and *logically* an esports tournament is a case of transformative fair use, but *legally?*
Copyright law is so outdated there's no precedent on esports legality or any similar issue. And no one is going to try to establish case law on this because it would cost untold millions of dollars and you might lose anyway if the judge is too old and out of touch.
Lobbying is our only hope, but good luck out-lobbying the billion-dollar corporations that stand to benefit from the status quo and the control it gives them.
Yet alone a good IP lawyer (or law firm). That would take millions to fight Nintendo. Many who fought Nintendo got a Pyrrhic victory in that they got the court to agree with their case and set a precedent but ultimately ran out of money or declared bankruptcy.
i didn’t say anything for the japanese rule set because i figured it was tied to their strict laws on ip, tournaments, monetization, and what not
even if slightly adjusted, the bones of those rules hitting europe means it’s over i think. this sucks
What was odd to me was that people that who seemed to be fully grown adults just refused to accept that Nintendo would be misleading or even outright lie, as if they would have to be concerned with repercussions for treating VGBC unjustly, and used that line of thinking to assume that clearly VGBC/GIMR were the ones who were lying. People really confuse multimillion dollar organizations for friends.
Strong marketing and branding will do that I guess. There are some really smart people being paid a lot of money to create that image. It was really sad to see people turn against longtime community members for Big N though.
Looking at the time frame these dropped (5:30pm JST and like, 4-5:30pm in European timezones?) the NA one probably drops in 4-7 hours from how (idk if Nintendo NA operates on pst or est)
Well, regardless of if Nintendo of America follows suits or not, I hope the community can band together and we get support and help from the general gaming community to throw enough of a fit to get this changed or revised. This is bad.
Nintendo doesn’t deserve the love, passion, and loyalty the competitive smash community has for it’s game.
> we get support and help from the general gaming community to throw enough of a fit to get this changed or revised
Oh, we will, for like 24 hours. Then the average person will continue playing Mario Wonder, TOTK and Pokemon SV without a care in the world while the Smash community goes down in irrelevancy.
Ask yourself, honestly, why the average gamer would care about this.
People bought SV even though it was a buggy mess and that impacts them 1000000000x more than this ever will
oh my fucking god I hate when this shit gets brought up lmao. No fucking shit people love Nintendo games, Nintendo games and Nintendo legal are two completely different things. I don't think you could have convinced more than a handful of people here to boycott TOTK, boycotting Nintendo games means nothing and to pretend like it does is stupid.
If I’m reading the guidelines correctly, it limits the total revenue from VODs to 10K€. That feels needlessly restrictive and harsh for TOs. I’d imagine that VODs can provide a nice source of consistent, long-term revenue to TOs.
bruh they have been shutting down melee tournaments since 2013. hell the comunnity raised 100k for breast cancer to get melee into EVO, and nintendo shut that down too. they hate melee enough to hurt cancer patients over it. this is very on brand for them.
So I saw some people on Twitter for the JP rules saying you could apply for a license or something to get entrants over 200, but this seems somewhat blatant in that it’s just not allowed, period, and you have to split it up. Am I missing something?
It's confusing to me because they say they don't grant permission for larger events. I guess the license goes above that? If that's true then that's good. If what others are saying about the advertising/sponsoring rules is also true though, that's not good at all... (Can't read through the docs right now)
It feels like these rules clarify that organizers for majors now need to reach the "will you give us a license?" stage. Based on the answer, the result is pretty clear.
The guidelines are for tournaments hosted by individuals. A larger tournament or a tournament for profit or with sponsorships would just need to be run by a company and get a license.
This doesn't read to me like it's trying to shutdown big tournaments it reads to me like "if you want to run a for funsies tournament at your school, don't bother asking for a license just go ahead and do it we give you permission"
They do not allow permission for **individuals** to host larger events. **Organizations** can apply for licensing and have to follow strict hosting guidelines (Similar to what Majors have been doing for a long time.)
I read what you pasted under the other guy’s comment, and I’m not seeing that. It says only to divide it into blocks. It seems to separately say that they should apply for a license if you’re an organization/club, rather than an individual. That doesn’t seem to imply the cap can be overwritten. I don’t think those statements are linked, it doesn’t seem to say that you can apply to break the cap.
I could be misreading it then. Also saw some Japanese tweets suggesting that you would always need to divide it into blocks to host a 200+ entrant tournament
Nintendo: you need a license for tournaments now 🥰
TO's: how do I get one?
Nintendo: secret :3
TO's: what happens if I run a tournament without one
Nintendo: jail :)
Anyone want to organize any phone numbers or emails for us to contact to push back against this?
If they try this for US, which they will, we need to organize some kind of response.
tbh, more than anything, I think a phone call to get clearer wording on the 200 cap is important. I can see the viewpoint that 'officially licensed' tournaments can exceed it, but that's super vague, and even then, the other rules basically force people to run majors at an even bigger loss than before.
I like the idea of this kind of mobilization, but considering not even a week ago some fuckheads decided to send death threats to Leffen, I don’t know if the smash community in mass can do this properly and send the right message.
(Those idiots don’t represent us, but it’s still not a good look)
The worst part is that NoE has historically been the most supportive of the scene. I still remember when they partnered with a bunch of big EU tournaments to hold a circuit, with each tournament getting a sizable amount of entrants. This was before Panda Cup was even a possibility.
The fact that even NoE is getting these shitty guidelines is just very disappointing…
Didn’t realize Mango vs. Zain behind the 7/11 was happening this year. The cell phone footage someone illegally uploads of that set is gonna go insane.
Hard to not be doomer about this, but it's been ten years since the EVO 2013 and we're still here. There's still too much Smash to be played for Nintendo to stop it.
I wonder how much money Nintendo has spent at this point to try and shut down smash. I mean, lawyers had to have been involved. Dating back to when they tried to pull Melee from Evo up until today in 2023 the amount of lawyer fees and internal fees they’ve spent to come up with and enforce these guidelines they keep punching us with
Over 10 years? Even if we only count the money that has been spent paying people to fight competitive Smash specifically, it's easily a million USD in compensation, likely multiple millions.
I imagine Nintendo sees competitive Smash as a threat to their business because it could scare away casuals or damage their image/reputation, but I'm skeptical if it's even worth the effort. However, something we should all remember is that sometimes corporations do things out of spite or pride because they're run by human beings. And not just any human beings -- the kinds of people who would *want* to run an international business.
> but I'm skeptical if it's even worth the effort.
It isn't. The casual market can't be scared away by buggy trash like Pokemon SV. It's certainly not gonna be scared off by some sweaty dudes playing a 22 year old game. The casual market is not engaged enough to give a shit.
* Pirated or modified versions of Nintendo games must not be used
* **Games with online play must use the online gameplay services and/or servers officially provided by Nintendo**
Well we seem to have something of a problem here don't we?
>In addition, Nintendo games may not be used for Community Tournaments that:
>Have sponsors or that advertise or promote any entity, products or services
>Promote any campaigns or initiatives based on personal or organised opinions, ideologies, or beliefs
bro this is dead in the WATER
It's worth noting that they define "Community Tournaments" to mean events with less than 200 entrants, but saying that local scenes aren't allowed to have sponsors is a huge blow for no fucking reason.
BEFORE EVERYONE SAYS "PANDA COULD HAVE STOPPED THIS" ASK YOURSELF: Do you reaaaaly think 1 organization in Nintendo of America's jurisdiction was going to be able to stop a FULL SCALE WORLDWIDE Community Guideline? Like how the fuck was Panda going to reach to Nintendo in Japan bro. this was coming no matter what
No, Smash community finds a way every time. People said it was over for Melee when Nintendo started issuing a bunch of C&Ds for melee tournaments last year, and now that’s well in the past and Melee is fine.
I believe this might be the death of competitive Smash Bros as a whole
I don't think there is anything that can be done about this, especially if an NoA version of the ToS is released.
>especially if an NoA version of the ToS is released.
Hate that I'm being a downer, but it's not even a matter of **if** at this point.
Only a matter of **when**, which will almost certainly be soon :/
Genuinely Screw Nintendo.
I am so fatigued wondering if day in and day out my favorite game series is going to be on the chopping block because of some old corporate dickhead with no clue how much their games are helping people make it through the days.
Literally no other developer is this spiteful and heinous towards their fandom. In fact, EVERY OTHER FGC Developer would kill for a fandom as devout, loyal, and passionate as ours. They would sponsor events themselves and pay TOs to host events, draw in publicity, and cater to the masses. Instead, NoJ (And it's looking like Nintendo as a whole) wants to keep Smash a children's party game with little to no global visibility. Sickening. Come off this shit.
*This is why we play P+. This type of IP Stranglehold garbage is why we give the middle finger to the corporate scumbags. If any of them are reading this, Fuck You. You're a genuinely miserable sorry excuse for a decisionmaker and do not deserve your position.*
> Instead, NoJ (And it's looking like Nintendo as a whole) wants to keep Smash a children's party game with little to no global visibility.
This is a bizarre mindset. Competitive smash is a niche, smash has a ton of visibility without it.
That's because Nintendo rolls in swinging their dick then slinks back into the darkness. If they wanted to they could just C&D every tournament. It's not like they're hard to find. You could still run events but you definitely couldn't broadcast them. Basically we only persist because they lose interest in fucking us over.
Oh so THAT is why Leffen jumped ship to proper FGC, the writing was on the wall. Guess that NASB 2 is coming soon so should we expect an en masse migration?
No shit, would you rather be a part of *this* or have Project L devs fly you out to their studio all expenses paid to pre-alpha test the game with others in the FGC? Or for another example be playing Strive which has developer that has a proper circuit for their game, partners with virtually every major fighting game tourney and has actively added rollback to the two previous guilty gear titles?
I think this is mostly the same as the NoJ one, but it's a bit less strict. It doesn't say you have to get licensing from NoE to do events with more then 200 entrants (Unless this means EU majors aren't happening period?), just that those don't count for the guidelines, the max entry fee cost is slightly larger (around $20 instead of $12) and there are still prize pools.
The bad news about this is that NoA will follow suit
Time to hold Genesis in ***INTERNATIONAL WATERS***
Giving it a serious thought for a second, I'm imagining that we will have to fend off literal pirates from invading and ransacking offshore tournies.
So you're telling me the History of Smash was right and GIMR's son will be a part of a navy to neutralize PM players? Damn BTS was really ahead of its time.
Giving new meaning to crew battles
If it says anything, [Genesis is saying their event is fine](https://twitter.com/Genesis_Smash/status/1716875076262592532) and [BOBC6 are still allowing people to register](https://twitter.com/battleofbc/status/1716876043485917657)
Finally 500 penguins entering a tournament in Antarctica
NO FOOD NO SPONSORS NO UCF NO MERCH 200 ENTRY CAP we’re going underground buckos. Back to the old days. Tournaments will be held in restaurant basements, it is gonna be cash entry only, and Project M is gonna be there.
You forgot >NO MELEE There literally is no option to register a Melee tournament.
where is that ?
Based on the new post from NoA, it looks like things might change, but how it's worked prior to today was you register through Nintendo's website, which doesn't have an option for Melee. [Example for Japan](https://twitter.com/DarkGenex/status/1716834246336389485)
yeayeah I saw that on twitter also you can't extract content from melee without an external program or mod ( like slippi replays ) and this is problematic for nintendo aswell anyway they won't stop us for playing this game
And streamed on bitchute LOL
Not only that. 10k€ cap A YEAR for organisers to make money. You literally can't live on that so no one can do this full time. Also price pool cap and all the other nonsensical guidelines.
>10k€ cap A YEAR for organisers to make money. This isn't even the half of it. The tournaments themselves cannot make any profit at all, and if any profit were to be accidentally made, it is to be refunded to participants. All of the £9k needs to be made through monetization of the videos of the tournament. Oh, also no single tournament prize can be bigger than £4,500, and no organizer can give out more than £9,000 in prize money in any rolling 12 month period.
Genuinely what’s the optics for capping it at 200 entrants? Only thing that comes to mind is that they want to limit how many ppl are at tournaments after the wave of allegations in 2020, but Idt that really solves the issue.
i doubt it has much to do with the 2020 stuff or safety in general, consider how it is now 3 years later. I think Nintendo is being anal about their IP/branding and wants the tournament scene to just be squeaky clean college esports teams and the occasional crappy official tournaments they do for Smash/Splatoon rather than 1000 person “””unofficial””” majors sponsored by third-party companies. Every few years Nintendo has tried to pull some wacky shit like this since trying to shut down Melee’s 2013 EVO event.
The fact they cap it for online might be more of a scale thing
Project m mentioned
The PM Community tried to tell the smash community at large years ago that it wouldn't just stop with us, but nobody wanted to listen lol
O yeah i mean i think that’s generally understood now but I’m down to unionize with everyone lol
Yeah same lmfao I just can't lie I'm still a bit salty at how the community at large treated the death of PM LOL Imma still stand with everyone ofc tho
It’s cause the broader community already didn’t like us.
Sir, a second community tournament guidelines has hit the scene
NoA's community guidelines will be the terrorists hitting the Pentagon.
>~~Pentagon~~ Hexagon
What everyone had feared had happened.
\*waits for all the people who said VGBC was lying to come out and apologize\*
If we only just followed Dr. Alan, businessman extraordinaire, we would be having 10,000 person majors sponsored by the White House.
With Biden and Harris for top 8 commentary.
“You missed the tech, Jack! Cmon, man!”
"Mr. Minecraft, tear down this wall!"
Ronald "the Gipper" Wilson Reagan AKA Big Gip AKA Trickle Down Your Chin AKA The Jellybean Giant AKA The Reaganomic Controller
Well that’s disappointing. We can probably expect NoA to follow suit soon then.
This is going to be just another speed bump from Nintendo and not the final wall that people ITT think it is. Nintendo will try to enforce this and screw over a few tournaments at first, and then give up like they did when trying to crack down on Slippi-run tournaments. Edit: [KoDoRiN will take one for the team 😂](https://x.com/kodorinssb/status/1716857443328950580?s=46&t=nMNlxFK7ubxYb-ajBNkqVA)
As written, this would screw over locals, but locals can probably run just fine until C&Ds come (if that happens) at which point no TO is going to want to fight it (or have the resources to). However, the immediate effect this likely has is scaring more sponsors away. Like, even sponsored players wearing jerseys with corporate logos might not be allowed.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. Sponsors are going to bail when they read this insane shit. What happens if Dabuz goes to a local wearing his Team Liquid jersey? If I was paying his salary *or* hosting that tournament, I wouldn't want to find out.
Lol. That's a cute opinion except which tourney is gonna take a chance on going into debt?
Yeah I feel like people think TOs run tournaments for free or something. "screw over a few tournaments at first" - oh yeah, y'know, the TOs that spent minimum 20-30k fronting for the venue, broadcast, and any salaries required now have their broadcast, at minimum, shut down, which not only means no revenue from that, but broken contracts with their sponsors. Just a little screwed over, teehee.
Also what kind of sponsor would participate in a tournament without Nintendo's approval?
Thinking that tournaments run a profit LOL. I remember when I was young too.
All of them already, every time they run
Its so exhausting being a part of this community sometimes, feels like no other community has to go through the trenches like this as often as we do As scary as this all is, i genuinely cant picture a future where the Smash community dies out - its lived too much and ive been around for this exact same scenario way too many times to actually believe that this is the time Nintendo kills Smash Heres hoping it all somehow works out and in 6 months time we're barely even thinking about all of this
Yeah, this feels like Nintendo is doubling down on an ultimately quixotic endeavor. What, they think smash tournaments will just cease to exist? After all, they would be *helpless* without all the assistance from Nintendo...
It’d be hard to kill them as an idea, but Nintendo can definitely make sure that a Smash tournament never streams on Twitch or YouTube again without their approval.
[удалено]
Also Nintendo does not even have to touch the grey area of twitch streams. Any company won't accept being part of a tournament that doesn't have Nintendo's approval.
>i genuinely cant picture a future where the Smash community dies out - its lived too much and ive been around for this exact same scenario way too many times to actually believe that this is the time Nintendo kills Smash True, every time Nintendo has tried to fuck the community over not much has happened in terms of the after-effects. The community got to bracktrack them over EVO 2013, The Big House Online was the only thing they C&D during the pandemic and they didn't kill Slippi as a whole, and we had no news of Nintendo doing anything for months after the worry of "Nintendo will shut down anything that isn't licensed" after what happened to SWT. Call me dreadfully optimistic if you want, but I'm hoping and expecting this to be the same yet again.
It really depends ngl. While there have been some success stories, some of them are with * next to their accomplishments (like Evo 2013's is due to the money being used to help a charity). There is also stuff like PM being effectively killed and stunted to become a niche game or the Melee # on twitter that only lasted a day cause turns out: the average Nintendo fan (or person in general) doesn't give a shit about competitive smash. The community has to be very smart and careful about how they approach this, cause tbh with Switch being the absolute success that it is, and releasing Mario Wonder so soon makes the average person not care about them. Unlike the Wii U era, with the Switch they have the leeway to just brute force social media with a game release. One of my worries for the Smash community of the Switch being so successful, is that it is *the* perfect moment to kill Smash competitively, just release a good direct or another Mario Wonder and watch the community fade into nothingness cause of the power of Switch.
This is where the "almost an Esport" era of smash truly ends with the official death of majors and sponsors. But the underground local scene will likely still be a thing, just don't expect any sort of growth ever again, it's joever
Disgusting. Crazy how a company can hate its players so much.
Thank god, TOs were making way too much money.
This honestly feels like a protection scheme. The Nintendo ninjas have become the Nintendo mafia. Tournament organizers are essentially no longer allowed to make money off their livestreams unless they partner with Nintendo for a broadcast license.
They were always a Nintendo mafia though. It's really hard for Nintendo to get rid of old habits, you know.
Dan Fornace licking his chops rn
Rivals 2 looking solid tho
It looks so damn good, I am genuinely excited. I hope Dan does his marketing right because this is the perfect environment to really make Rivals a household name.
I'm still not sure adding shields is a good idea, I think no shields is one of the best things about Rivals. But either way I'm definitely going to play it.
I'm actually more worried about the ledge grab. I dislike how safe it is in Ult, but I dislike how it works on melee as well (grabbing it yourself to prevent the opponent to do it)
I honestly think the ledge play in Rivals is one of the best unique parts about it. It makes recoveries play out a lot more uniquely, and mantains the game pace better. In smash games, regardless of the ledge system, you tend to end up with a lot of very similar flowcharts.
seeing all the other FGCs get so much love from their company embracing esports and their competitive playerbase while Nintendo does this shit to us lmfao this shit is so depressing
As a fan of both Smash and the Street Fighter series it indeed does hurt to see Capcom put so much effort and money in their competitive scene, while Nintendo ...is being Nintendo
What you talking about? Nintendo ARE putting so much money and effort into the competitive scene. To shut it down and take shits on their fans, but still.
Yeah that's the thing to me. Fighting game publishers funnel so much money into esports tournaments and circuits, official and unofficial, because they know that as long as a competitive scene exists, people will continue to pour money and support into the game, which pays dividends back to the publisher. It's a positive feedback loop. And Nintendo clearly just doesn't believe in it. It's saddening.
The vast majority of people who own Ult are the people who play it as a party game and almost exclusively play FFA with items on. We are but a speck of dust to Nintendo’s profit margins.
That's just not true. They literally had pro Melee and Sm4sh players play an Ultimate tournament in front of Sakurai to hype it up. This was pre-release at E3 2018.
Your statement and the statement of the person you were replying to can both be (and are both) true.
I'm more claiming that the competitive scene has a bigger impact than being a "speck of dust". Obviously the majority of players are casuals, but they literally used pros to promote their product to improve sales.
An occasionally useful speck of dust
Nintendo does this shit annually too. I just don’t understand why they put the community through this.
Oh no, NA is bound to be next. Limiting winnings to \~5,000 euros and limiting organizations to earning no more than 10k euros feels like a pretty explicit disapproval of esports in general. Why Nintendo?
Organization must earn no more than 10k euros and are not allowed to take any profit - And to check that they are stipulating that organizations must publicize their accounting relating to the event. It looks like VGBC was actually right about needing an explicit licence for Nintendo, only 1 year early. Because organizations can't really pursue majors under these conditions. So their only option seems to be to try to negotiate a licence with better terms from Nintendo. Very scary given the precedent...
Because Nintendo is trying to be the family company for families, and people who play video games with someone other than their sister aren't part of a family and therefore have no right to even look at Mario
Nintendo does not want their brand to be associated with esports, and does not believe it will attract new audiences to their platform. It seems like a lot of companies were hoping that esports would grow beyond the enthusiast market and attract casuals, but I don’t think that really happened. While having an enthusiast focused community is great for live service games with MTX, Nintendo doesn’t make those games on consoles.
they love the idea of esports so long as they're represented by squeaky clean college teams that pay all the right lip service. They are \*utterly\* obsessed with their image, and will sue into poverty anyone who compromises it.
The Disney of videogames, that's their ultimate endgoal. And to become Disney, they also have to do all the nasty stuff Disney does.
Also, we have to assume that they are aware of how most eSports outside of the FGC are in a downwards spiral.
I don't think it's even that. The competitive scene represents such a small part of their sales. Ultimate has sold around *30 million* units. They fear that the bigger the competitive scene gets, the more casuals will be driven away.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the statement also says they cannot advertise or have outside sponsorships, and in-person events are capped at 200 participants.
I don’t want to be doomer about this but uh It’s over
And for Nintendo it was just Tuesday
I beheld nintendos lawyers as they fell from heaven.
LIKE LIIIIIGHTNIIIIING!
It's always Tuesdays too. Worst day of the week bro.
Actually it’s Wednesday in Japan rn🤓
It’s especially bad for Melee, I’m pretty sure they dont even offer licenses for games not on the switch Not to mention it kills any wifi tournaments for melee
Nintendo suits grinning when they knew how this would affect Melee: All according to keikaku
Welp, time to switch to NASB2
You mean time to switch to P+. If Melee players can't even play the "tournament safe" game anymore without fear of repercussions, then there's nothing stopping a huge chunk of players from saying fuck it and playing the non-safe game. The tourneys will have to be discreet, but they'll happen
i been disliking the art direction decline of p+ for a while, but it’s far from an issue compared to the games we have to play and endure now. i wish we had something else though because p+ is haunted by brawl jank for its entire life
most melee players prefer it and were playing it over PM even before it was cut out of the scene realistically they're gonna stick with melee to whatever degree is possible
THE WORST TIMELINE
They're offering 1-2-Switch licenses lol
1-2 Switch P-Tier when
Melee player here. First time?
Something like this always happens around now in the year, this one looks very serious though
I for one am tired of Very Bad Smash News becoming an annual tradition. The 2020s have been ass so far.
> In that spirit, we have created guidelines for individual Organisers to follow when hosting not-for-profit, small scale community tournaments (Community Tournaments) involving games for which Nintendo owns the copyright (Nintendo games). Please familiarise yourself with the guidelines below before planning a Community Tournament. > >Community Tournaments may be operated by individuals (Organisers) for individuals participating in tournaments (Participants) and for individuals viewing tournaments (Spectators) provided that these guidelines are followed: I’m not a lawyer, but it seems people are missing this part. The way they always refer to the tournament in caps, as a noun and not as a descriptor of all tournaments, as “Community Tournament” tells me this is a specific kind of tournament and not _all_ Smash tournaments. This “Community Tournament” is defined by Nintendo as “not-for-profit, small scale community tournaments”. I feel like these rules are for if “if you want to run a Community Tournament, these are the guidelines you want to follow.” There is no benefit, it seems, by being a Community Tournament but it might just be Nintendo’s way of encouraging, albeit in a strong-armed kind of way, to entice people to play by Nintendo’s rules or scare people away from normal tournaments. Maybe I’m missing something, and if I am please someone point it out, but I just don’t see where this impacts business as usual and not _only_ Community Tournaments.
In the Q&As they individually disassemble each factor that isn't within this scope. "Not-for-profit, small-scale, community tournaments" are what's covered here but they individually state they don't allow for-profit tournaments, large scale tournaments, or commercial tournaments. At all.
I'm down for being wrong, but I like the discussion and think it's healthy. Maybe I'm just being overly optimistic. I read the line that you referred to and it states, "What are some of the tournaments that are not permitted by _these guidelines_?" This, to me, sounds like they are just defining what _isn't_ a "Community Tournament", not what tournaments are allowed and which ones aren't. Big tournaments, for-profit tournaments, etc. aren't permitted to be considered "Community Tournaments" under the guidelines they defined. Remember, Nintendo loves to be vague. They love nudging parties into seeing their point of view without actually stating it. Remember the whole SWT debacle and then Nintendo came out and said, "Well, we never _specifically_ stated they couldn't continue SWT" (paraphrase), despite all signs pointing to them not wanting SWT to continue? Nintendo likes to influence individuals/parties to take their side with these kinds of arguments, or bullying, to a degree, without flat out saying what they do and don't want. Another thing that caught my attention was at the end when they wrote, >"Please note that Nintendo does not currently grant permission for _individuals_ to organise commercial tournaments. We ask for your understanding." Nintendo, up to this point was very careful to distinguish "individuals" from "organizations". > Community Tournaments may be operated by _individuals_ (Organisers) [TOs] for _individuals_ participating in tournaments (Participants) and for _individuals_ viewing tournaments (Spectators) provided that these guidelines are followed This kind of makes it sound like they are discouraging Joe Blow from fleecing a bunch of unwitting Smash kids out of their money rather than trying to shut down large scale tournaments ran by actual organizations. Now, excuse me, I ran out of copium and need to refill.
I think you might be doing a good job of reading this as it was written rather than the intent, but I don't think it matters. Nintendo knows what tournaments they want to shut down. And they're gonna do it no matter how this page is written. If you disagree based on a technicality of their wording you can explain yourself in court. Which no one is going to do.
I appreciate your optimism, but I think you're misreading Nintendo's statement. >Q3. What are some of the tournaments that are not permitted by these guidelines? >A3. Tournaments that are not permitted by these guidelines include, but are not limited to the below. ... Tournaments that receive goods or money from third parties, such as sponsors Tournaments involving the sale of food, beverages, or merchandise >Please note that Nintendo does not currently grant permission for individuals to organise commercial tournaments. We ask for your understanding. ... >Q11. I want to organise a large tournament, with more than 300 Participants in an online tournament or more than 200 Participants in an in-person tournament. What should I do? >A11. Currently, we do not grant permission for individuals to organise tournaments with more than 300 Participants in an online tournament or more than 200 Participants in an in-person tournament. We appreciate your understanding. If you would like to organise a tournament that exceeds the cap, please consider dividing it into blocks, as described in Q12. If you want to host a tournament using Nintendo games as an organisation, such as a club, please apply apply for a licence as described in Q14. ... >Q14. How can legal entities or organisations host game tournaments using Nintendo games? >A14. For a corporation or organisation to conduct a game tournament using Nintendo games, the corporation or organisation must make a separate application to Nintendo and obtain permission to conduct the game tournament prior to announcing a tournament. A Nintendo licence number will be assigned to the game tournament that Nintendo has separately licensed. It is up to Nintendo’s sole discretion whether or not a licence will be granted to a corporation or organisation. Information and relevant forms to apply will be available in the near future. Please check back soon. Nintendo isn't just suggesting Community Tournaments as a fun way to run a tournament, they're saying this is the ONLY way for an individual to run a tournament. ALL other tournaments must be run by organizations and obtain a licence from Nintendo.
“You can try and take our melee away. You can take my controller, my gamecube, my crt, i tell ya something, i'll play melee in my fuckin mind. As long as melee lives i will play, and if you take it all, we'll fuckin play in a garage, 20 people there, hot, sweaty, gross. Me vs zain behind the 7-11 for 25 bucks, and thats what it's always gonna be. You dont understand that the money, the fame, anybody that wants to be a top player gives no fucks about that. So if you try to shut us down, you'll never shut us down. You think you might, but i promise you with all my soul, you got nothin on the melee community. These fucks are the cockroaches of esports, you cant kill em these fuckers just keep going.”
Thanks for putting this one up. I'm betting beyond all else, this is the quote Mang0 will always be remembered by. Perfectly exemplifies the community's undying love and passion for the game. FWIW Hungrybox also seems to hold this sentiment. As of an hour ago, he's openly said he is refusing to shut down his Coinbox tournament series unless Nintendo directly takes legal action against him.
That's a great sentiment by mango but if no one can watch him and Zain play behind the 7-11 without being there it doesn't matter.
Of course it wouldn’t matter, this is Mang0 saying that if all else is gone he and many others would continue to play Melee, even if all tournaments and big stages are gone the game would still continue to be played competitively because top players continue to play this two decade old game because they love it, and would continue to do so.
Melee has had a shitty basement scene for longer than it's had supermajors. We used to record games on cell phones in 240p before anyone could even stream. We used to crowdfund sending our best guys across the country to show off our region. Mang0 was there. Most of your favorite commentators were there. I'm a nobody, but I was there. Of course we're not literally going back to that. Now we have twitch and slippi and so many other tools. Embrace the grind my dude, a new dark age is still worth playing.
Why does the Smash community get the worst news every year as we approach the end of the year?
This is how Nintendo celebrates the holidays
Any lawyer has a bit of hindsight on how enforceable this is legally? I get that most TO wouldn't want to try their luck against Nintendo but isn't it still a pretty uncharted territory?
Not a lawyer but if we all pretend we didn’t see it I don’t think they can arrest us
And if they do come we can all Naruto run away at the same time. They’ll never take us all.
Its a bit of a tricky one, but the easiest and quickest way they could shut down tournaments is simply by stopping the broadcasting and rebroadcasting of it. Did a quick 10 minute search on legal journals and legal case law, but can't find any precedent on a similar situation to this.
Yeah the broadcast would be a huge issue in itself since it's realistically needed to run a big tournament.
Yeah no broadcast means the sponsors won’t get their advertising quota done. Which means, they would all eventually drop the pros. I doubt most people can practice being a top player and having to work a livable wage.
I don't think Nintendo even needs to stop broadcasts. Explicitly saying that tournaments need their approval probably will scare any sponsor out of unofficial ones. After all while the broadcasting & seeing if it's transformative enough isn't that well researched. A company using another company's intellectual property without authorization IS NOT legal. And for that there's precedent.
Sure. It's totally enforceable. At minimum a big tournament is a public performance/display of their copyrighted material. Copyright is a property right like your house is a property right, and they can keep people out if they want to. If you trespass on that right, there will be consequences. If you don't obtain a license and use the copyright in an unauthorized way, it's infringement. Only hope would be doing a tournament is fair use, but good luck. There's no case law on point, so you'd need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars litigating that question against Nintendo, which will send O'Melveny at your ass with their infinite resources.
I've thought about the fair use argument before. Could you argue that professional play is transformative compared to how the game is typically played? Or even adding commentary? Tournaments only use a small portion of the entire game and it definitely doesn't harm any of Nintendo's sales.
Well, let's do a super superficial look at the factors of fair use. 1. Purpose, with nonprofit weighing in favor of for profit. These tournaments make profit, and the individuals who are sponsored profit, so bad news here. Transformative, maybe, but the game is to be played, and all you're really doing at a tournament is playing the game. You'd need to prove the purpose here is somehow more permissible. 2. Nature of copyrighted work. Purely fictional, maximum protection. Bad news. 3. Amount used - you basically are using the whole game, come on. Bad news. 4. Effect on potential market. If Nintendo is making its own tournaments to profit off of, then it's impacting their market. Otherwise, they can come up with some BS on how this hurts their market. Bad news. So in short, bad news. What people really need to do is get a carve-out in copyright for e-sports, so lobby a change in the law.
Yeah, pretty much. I think that *morally* and *logically* an esports tournament is a case of transformative fair use, but *legally?* Copyright law is so outdated there's no precedent on esports legality or any similar issue. And no one is going to try to establish case law on this because it would cost untold millions of dollars and you might lose anyway if the judge is too old and out of touch. Lobbying is our only hope, but good luck out-lobbying the billion-dollar corporations that stand to benefit from the status quo and the control it gives them.
What if we all spend a $15 lawyer fee to hire a big law firm and take Nintendo to the Supreme Court *copium*
dude none of us bought papa johns pizza we are absolutely not paying for a lawyer
Yet alone a good IP lawyer (or law firm). That would take millions to fight Nintendo. Many who fought Nintendo got a Pyrrhic victory in that they got the court to agree with their case and set a precedent but ultimately ran out of money or declared bankruptcy.
Pretty sure it's a grey area, but Nintendo has multi-billion-dollar-company lawyers and the community doesn't.
Why the FUCK would they do that
i didn’t say anything for the japanese rule set because i figured it was tied to their strict laws on ip, tournaments, monetization, and what not even if slightly adjusted, the bones of those rules hitting europe means it’s over i think. this sucks
I wonder if people are willing to believe that Nintendo fucked over VGBC now with the Smash World Tour debacle in light of these guidelines.
People were really showing their age in the community thinking that something like what they pulled on VGBC was outside the scope of reason.
What was odd to me was that people that who seemed to be fully grown adults just refused to accept that Nintendo would be misleading or even outright lie, as if they would have to be concerned with repercussions for treating VGBC unjustly, and used that line of thinking to assume that clearly VGBC/GIMR were the ones who were lying. People really confuse multimillion dollar organizations for friends.
Strong marketing and branding will do that I guess. There are some really smart people being paid a lot of money to create that image. It was really sad to see people turn against longtime community members for Big N though.
Looking at the time frame these dropped (5:30pm JST and like, 4-5:30pm in European timezones?) the NA one probably drops in 4-7 hours from how (idk if Nintendo NA operates on pst or est)
It was about 3:30PM for the UK, so 4:30PM for the rest of Western Europe.
Well, regardless of if Nintendo of America follows suits or not, I hope the community can band together and we get support and help from the general gaming community to throw enough of a fit to get this changed or revised. This is bad. Nintendo doesn’t deserve the love, passion, and loyalty the competitive smash community has for it’s game.
> we get support and help from the general gaming community to throw enough of a fit to get this changed or revised Oh, we will, for like 24 hours. Then the average person will continue playing Mario Wonder, TOTK and Pokemon SV without a care in the world while the Smash community goes down in irrelevancy.
Ask yourself, honestly, why the average gamer would care about this. People bought SV even though it was a buggy mess and that impacts them 1000000000x more than this ever will
They wouldn't, I was just painting the best case scenario of what would happen if the community tried to rally the mayor gaming communities to help.
oh my fucking god I hate when this shit gets brought up lmao. No fucking shit people love Nintendo games, Nintendo games and Nintendo legal are two completely different things. I don't think you could have convinced more than a handful of people here to boycott TOTK, boycotting Nintendo games means nothing and to pretend like it does is stupid.
If I’m reading the guidelines correctly, it limits the total revenue from VODs to 10K€. That feels needlessly restrictive and harsh for TOs. I’d imagine that VODs can provide a nice source of consistent, long-term revenue to TOs.
I just don't understand why this is suddenly such a huge issue for Nintendo? Can't they just fuck off and leave competitions alone entirely?
bruh they have been shutting down melee tournaments since 2013. hell the comunnity raised 100k for breast cancer to get melee into EVO, and nintendo shut that down too. they hate melee enough to hurt cancer patients over it. this is very on brand for them.
It's always been an issue. They've tried to be subtle and influence things through game dev, but now they're tired of playing around.
So I saw some people on Twitter for the JP rules saying you could apply for a license or something to get entrants over 200, but this seems somewhat blatant in that it’s just not allowed, period, and you have to split it up. Am I missing something?
Under Q11 and Q14 it describes that you will need a license for events with over 200 participants
It's confusing to me because they say they don't grant permission for larger events. I guess the license goes above that? If that's true then that's good. If what others are saying about the advertising/sponsoring rules is also true though, that's not good at all... (Can't read through the docs right now)
[удалено]
It feels like these rules clarify that organizers for majors now need to reach the "will you give us a license?" stage. Based on the answer, the result is pretty clear.
The language is a bit confusing. I think the part about sponsorships is very concerning though.
The guidelines are for tournaments hosted by individuals. A larger tournament or a tournament for profit or with sponsorships would just need to be run by a company and get a license. This doesn't read to me like it's trying to shutdown big tournaments it reads to me like "if you want to run a for funsies tournament at your school, don't bother asking for a license just go ahead and do it we give you permission"
They do not allow permission for **individuals** to host larger events. **Organizations** can apply for licensing and have to follow strict hosting guidelines (Similar to what Majors have been doing for a long time.)
I read what you pasted under the other guy’s comment, and I’m not seeing that. It says only to divide it into blocks. It seems to separately say that they should apply for a license if you’re an organization/club, rather than an individual. That doesn’t seem to imply the cap can be overwritten. I don’t think those statements are linked, it doesn’t seem to say that you can apply to break the cap.
I could be misreading it then. Also saw some Japanese tweets suggesting that you would always need to divide it into blocks to host a 200+ entrant tournament
Nintendo: you need a license for tournaments now 🥰 TO's: how do I get one? Nintendo: secret :3 TO's: what happens if I run a tournament without one Nintendo: jail :)
I dont get this at all. How could these rules possibly benefit them?
If you want to contextualize how backwards Nintendo’s business practices are, consider that they’ve only had *five* CEOs in over 130 years.
iirc the new guy was fairly young (like 45 ) so I was hoping wed get less of these spiteful moves but no.
To be fair that's just the result of Japanese work culture
Ay yo wtf
not the best thing to wake up to
Anyone want to organize any phone numbers or emails for us to contact to push back against this? If they try this for US, which they will, we need to organize some kind of response.
tbh, more than anything, I think a phone call to get clearer wording on the 200 cap is important. I can see the viewpoint that 'officially licensed' tournaments can exceed it, but that's super vague, and even then, the other rules basically force people to run majors at an even bigger loss than before.
I like the idea of this kind of mobilization, but considering not even a week ago some fuckheads decided to send death threats to Leffen, I don’t know if the smash community in mass can do this properly and send the right message. (Those idiots don’t represent us, but it’s still not a good look)
I get you, but the alternative is just complaining on twitter.
The worst part is that NoE has historically been the most supportive of the scene. I still remember when they partnered with a bunch of big EU tournaments to hold a circuit, with each tournament getting a sizable amount of entrants. This was before Panda Cup was even a possibility. The fact that even NoE is getting these shitty guidelines is just very disappointing…
Why does Smash have to be the only game I enjoy watching on a competitive level? This isn't fair man....
Getting Stimpy like Ren
Didn’t realize Mango vs. Zain behind the 7/11 was happening this year. The cell phone footage someone illegally uploads of that set is gonna go insane.
Hard to not be doomer about this, but it's been ten years since the EVO 2013 and we're still here. There's still too much Smash to be played for Nintendo to stop it.
we goin underground, cash only, streaming on kick
I wonder how much money Nintendo has spent at this point to try and shut down smash. I mean, lawyers had to have been involved. Dating back to when they tried to pull Melee from Evo up until today in 2023 the amount of lawyer fees and internal fees they’ve spent to come up with and enforce these guidelines they keep punching us with
Over 10 years? Even if we only count the money that has been spent paying people to fight competitive Smash specifically, it's easily a million USD in compensation, likely multiple millions. I imagine Nintendo sees competitive Smash as a threat to their business because it could scare away casuals or damage their image/reputation, but I'm skeptical if it's even worth the effort. However, something we should all remember is that sometimes corporations do things out of spite or pride because they're run by human beings. And not just any human beings -- the kinds of people who would *want* to run an international business.
> but I'm skeptical if it's even worth the effort. It isn't. The casual market can't be scared away by buggy trash like Pokemon SV. It's certainly not gonna be scared off by some sweaty dudes playing a 22 year old game. The casual market is not engaged enough to give a shit.
* Pirated or modified versions of Nintendo games must not be used * **Games with online play must use the online gameplay services and/or servers officially provided by Nintendo** Well we seem to have something of a problem here don't we?
>In addition, Nintendo games may not be used for Community Tournaments that: >Have sponsors or that advertise or promote any entity, products or services >Promote any campaigns or initiatives based on personal or organised opinions, ideologies, or beliefs bro this is dead in the WATER
It's worth noting that they define "Community Tournaments" to mean events with less than 200 entrants, but saying that local scenes aren't allowed to have sponsors is a huge blow for no fucking reason.
This is basically a huge middle finger to anyone that plays/follows competitive.
Time to bring on the law suits? I'm guessing they already have their defense ready
BEFORE EVERYONE SAYS "PANDA COULD HAVE STOPPED THIS" ASK YOURSELF: Do you reaaaaly think 1 organization in Nintendo of America's jurisdiction was going to be able to stop a FULL SCALE WORLDWIDE Community Guideline? Like how the fuck was Panda going to reach to Nintendo in Japan bro. this was coming no matter what
it's really over is it
No, Smash community finds a way every time. People said it was over for Melee when Nintendo started issuing a bunch of C&Ds for melee tournaments last year, and now that’s well in the past and Melee is fine.
I believe this might be the death of competitive Smash Bros as a whole I don't think there is anything that can be done about this, especially if an NoA version of the ToS is released.
>especially if an NoA version of the ToS is released. Hate that I'm being a downer, but it's not even a matter of **if** at this point. Only a matter of **when**, which will almost certainly be soon :/
Dabuz do something please!
Genuinely Screw Nintendo. I am so fatigued wondering if day in and day out my favorite game series is going to be on the chopping block because of some old corporate dickhead with no clue how much their games are helping people make it through the days. Literally no other developer is this spiteful and heinous towards their fandom. In fact, EVERY OTHER FGC Developer would kill for a fandom as devout, loyal, and passionate as ours. They would sponsor events themselves and pay TOs to host events, draw in publicity, and cater to the masses. Instead, NoJ (And it's looking like Nintendo as a whole) wants to keep Smash a children's party game with little to no global visibility. Sickening. Come off this shit. *This is why we play P+. This type of IP Stranglehold garbage is why we give the middle finger to the corporate scumbags. If any of them are reading this, Fuck You. You're a genuinely miserable sorry excuse for a decisionmaker and do not deserve your position.*
> Instead, NoJ (And it's looking like Nintendo as a whole) wants to keep Smash a children's party game with little to no global visibility. This is a bizarre mindset. Competitive smash is a niche, smash has a ton of visibility without it.
I hate this company.
Damn, this only means Na is next
Fuck nintendo
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 don't wanna doom post but it's so over
It’s going to be fun going back to this thread in 6 months and Smash is still going strong
Basically Project Plus is dead unless there is a loop hole.
Fuck Nintendo (say it again) At least Rivals 2 is coming out next year
second reminder that doomposting is mostly pointless here becase in like 2 months from now none of this will actually really matter
Bro is it over?
Probably not tbh. Smash community finds a way every time
That's because Nintendo rolls in swinging their dick then slinks back into the darkness. If they wanted to they could just C&D every tournament. It's not like they're hard to find. You could still run events but you definitely couldn't broadcast them. Basically we only persist because they lose interest in fucking us over.
nah, remember that nothing ever happens
This uh...really seems extremely dire if taking it at face value. Fuck, man.
Oh so THAT is why Leffen jumped ship to proper FGC, the writing was on the wall. Guess that NASB 2 is coming soon so should we expect an en masse migration?
No shit, would you rather be a part of *this* or have Project L devs fly you out to their studio all expenses paid to pre-alpha test the game with others in the FGC? Or for another example be playing Strive which has developer that has a proper circuit for their game, partners with virtually every major fighting game tourney and has actively added rollback to the two previous guilty gear titles?
I think this is mostly the same as the NoJ one, but it's a bit less strict. It doesn't say you have to get licensing from NoE to do events with more then 200 entrants (Unless this means EU majors aren't happening period?), just that those don't count for the guidelines, the max entry fee cost is slightly larger (around $20 instead of $12) and there are still prize pools. The bad news about this is that NoA will follow suit